Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Tax Plan

The Tax Policy Center has estimated the distributional effects of a fully-phased-in version of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan. Summary tables are available here   View this page as a PDF

Herman Cain’s plan would eliminate the current individual income tax, corporate income tax, payroll tax, and estate and gift tax and substitute three taxes imposed at a 9 percent rate: 1) a 9 percent “national sales tax” 2) a 9 percent “business flat tax”, and 3) a 9 percent “individual flat tax.” Based on descriptions from the Cain campaign website and Fiscal Associates, the firm that analyzed the proposal for the Cain campaign, we conclude that all three taxes are versions of well-known forms of consumption taxes, although collected in different ways and with a few modifications.¹ The bases of all three taxes are essentially the same as the base of a national sales tax. The basic structures of the three taxes are:

1. National Sales Tax: This is a retail sales tax, collected on sales to final consumers. It is imposed on all sales to households, non-profit institutions and governments, as well as sales by the business activities of government and non-profits (for example, revenues of non-profit hospitals.) The tax is modeled on the Fair Tax proposal that has been proposed by Americans for Fair Taxation and was first introduced in Congress by Representative John Linder (R-GA) in 1999. The tax rate is 9 percent of the total price (including tax) charged by businesses to consumers.²

2. Business Tax: This is a subtraction method value-added tax, sometimes called a business transfer tax (BTT). All businesses would pay a 9 percent tax on all sales minus purchases from other businesses (including purchases of investment goods). This is essentially the same as a retail sales tax, except that it is collected in pieces on the value added at each stage of production. In the aggregate, those pieces add up to retail sales.

3. Individual Flat Tax: As described by Fiscal Associates, this is a version of the Flat Tax originally developed by Professors Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka and endorsed in the past by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, and former Presidential candidate Steve Forbes. The flat tax is a subtraction method value-added tax, similar to the BTT, with the exception that businesses may deduct wages paid and workers must report and pay taxes on their wages. With a single rate, however, it makes no difference whether the worker or the business remits the tax. (The original flat tax proposal would have allowed workers to claim exemptions for themselves and dependents, but the Cain proposal has no such adjustment.)

The three taxes include several modifications.

We assume that the national sales tax and business flat tax are imposed independently on businesses so they sum to sales tax rate of 18 percent. The individual flat tax, however, is applied to real wages that have been reduced by 18 percent by the other two taxes. The 9 percent individual tax thus applies to only 82 percent of tax-inclusive consumption, making its effective rate 7.38 percent of all consumption. Therefore, the three taxes combined are equivalent to a 25.38 percent national sales tax, with the above mentioned adjustments for dividends paid to tax-exempt entities and charitable contributions.

The Cain campaign documents also contain some discussion of deductions for empowerment zones that might relieve some of the tax burden on low wage workers. We have not received any details of these provisions and thus cannot estimate them. If such relief were to be provided, it could relieve some of the burden at the low end of the income distribution, but would reduce the net revenue raised by the proposal.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that, if fully phased in, the plan would raise about $2.55 trillion of revenues at 2013 levels of income and consumption, virtually the same amount that would be collected if current tax policy were in place that year (that is, if 2011 tax law, other than the payroll tax reduction, were extended). However, the plan would raise about $300 billion less revenue than would be raised by current tax law, under which most 2001-2010 tax cuts would have expired by 2013.³

Read the source article here.

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One of the factors widely believed to have contributed to the current income inequality is the move from low-skill to high-skill jobs. New research asserts that Obamacare will only exacerbate income inequality by pricing less skilled workers out of full time jobs.

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“President Obama’s health care law requires employers to offer health benefits to full-time employees. This employer mandate will price many unskilled workers out of full-time employment.

After paying the new health premiums, the minimum wage, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes, hiring a full-time worker will cost employers at least $10.03 per hour. Full-time workers with family health plans will cost $13.75 per hour. Employers who hire workers with productivity below these rates will lose money. Businesses employing less skilled workers will probably respond by dumping their employees onto the federally subsidized health care exchanges and replacing full-time positions with part-time jobs.” [Emphasis mine].

Read the research about what this will do to less skilled workers here.

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While the tea party and the Occupy Wall St. have been described as fringe elements of either party; i was hoping this might spur a new party or two within our political process.

Two would be nice, but for now the fledgling would be society changers have uncanny similarities. So maybe they could more into a peoples party…

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A peaceful protest can not be disbanded…. 

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Tj8UlxhfJLw#! 450 300]

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Cheers!

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This article describes the deficiencies present in typical measure of income inequality, describes some trends, and list some possible causes.

As we continue to examine the #OWS raised issue of income inequality, ask yourself if the data being presented in the media is accurate. Furthermore, are the causes of income inequality as simple as #OWS would have you believe?

 

Distribution of Income

The Causes of Inequality

In one sense, the growth of inequality in the last part of the twentieth century comes as a surprise. In the 1950s, the bottom part of the income distribution contained large concentrations of two kinds of families: farm families whose in-kind income was not counted in Census data, and elderly families, many of whom were ineligible for the new Social Security program. Over subsequent decades, farm families declined as a proportion of the population while increased Social Security benefits and an expanding private pension system lifted elderly incomes. Both trends favored greater income equality but were outweighed by four main factors.

These factors, however, can explain only part of the increase in inequality. One other factor that explains the particularly high incomes of the highest-paid people is that between 1982 and 2004, the ratio of pay of chief executive officers to pay of the average worker rose from 42:1 to 301:1, and pay of other high-level managers, lawyers, and people in other fields rose substantially also.

Read the rest of the research here.

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Read on investor

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Since income inequality seems to be one of the concerns of the #Occupy Wall Street protestors, I thought I’d dig up some research about it so that we may all have a more thorough, if not intelligent understanding of the matter…Be sure to read the whole article. I’ve included the conclusion here, because I’m sure it will stimulate your interest and challenge your assumptions.

Conclusion

The Census income distribution figures are the foundation of most class-warfare rhetoric. On the surface, these figures show a high level of inequality: The top fifth of households have $14.30 of income for every $1.00 at the bottom.

However, these figures are flawed by the exclusion of taxes and social safety net spending and by the fact that the “fifths” do not contain equal numbers of people. Adjustment for these factors radically alters the picture of income distribution: The top fifth of the population has $4.21 of income for every $1.00 at the bottom.

The remaining inequality in society is heavily influenced by the lack of work at the bottom. If working-age adults in the lower quintiles worked as much as their higher-income counterparts, the income disparity of the top to the bottom quintiles would fall to $2.91 to $1.00.

Still, the top fifth of U.S. households (with incomes above $84,000) remain perennial targets of class-warfare enmity. These families, however, perform a third of all labor in the economy. They contain the best educated and most productive workers, and they provide a disproportionate share of the investment needed to create jobs and spur economic growth. Nearly all are married-couple families, many with two or more earners. Far from shirking the tax burden, these families pay 82.5 percent of total federal income taxes and two-thirds of federal taxes overall. By contrast, the bottom quintile pays 1.1 percent of total federal taxes.12

In one sense, John Edwards is correct: There is one America that works a lot and pays a lot in taxes, and there is another America that works less and pays little. However, the reality is the opposite of what Edwards suggests. It is the higher-income families who work a lot and pay nearly all the taxes. Raising taxes even higher on hard-working families would be unfair and, by reducing future investments, would reduce economic growth, harming all Americans in the long run.

Read the research here.

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87% of New Yorkers say it’s okay to protest

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HAVANA – Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez likely has less than two years to live, his former doctor said, as the ailing firebrand traveled to Cuba for a checkup following cancer treatment.

Chavez, 57, has been through four rounds of chemotherapy in Cuba since revealing he had a cancerous tumor removed in June. But Venezuela has provided few details about the exact nature of the cancer, aside from that it was in the pelvic area.

Salvador Navarrete, his former personal surgeon, told Mexican newspaper Milenio Semanal on Sunday that the leader’s condition likely was worse than publicly admitted.

The doctor described the prognosis as “not good.” He added, “When I say this, I mean that he has no more than two years to live.”

Navarrete said Chavez likely was suffering from either a tumor in his pelvis or a sarcoma, which would explain the intensive course of treatment.

Navarrete was the personal surgeon for Chavez from 2002 until earlier this year, when Chavez changed his medical staff to exclusively Cuban doctors.

Before departing for Havana, Chavez told Venezuelan TV that the visit was routine, but he did not disclose any details of his condition. Earlier reports said the visit was for a checkup, to see whether there were any malignant cells in his body, AFP reported.

Chavez has been in power since 1999 and has maintained that he will recover in time to win re-election in 2012.

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Who is funding them?

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Dana Loesch reports:

“In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)”

 

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Read the rest of the article here.

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Barack Obama, US president, offered more support for protesters against the global financial system after a weekend of demonstrations in cities around the world, but called on them not to “demonise” those who worked on Wall Street.

On Sunday, Mr Obama honoured Martin Luther King at a dedication to a new memorial on National Mall in Washington. Referring to protests that have spread from Wall Street to London, Rome and elsewhere, Mr Obama said: “Dr King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonising those who work there.” Mr Obama had previously said the protests “express the frustration” of ordinary Americans with the financial sector.

READ MORE HERE  

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‘It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was “pleading for some kind of adult supervision” in Washington and “desperate for strong leadership.” Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor’s, he wrote, “I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.”

His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, “there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country.” Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, “The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he’s not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing.”

We are sitting on the 18th floor of a skyscraper the day after protesters have marched on the homes of other Manhattan billionaires. It may seem odd that most of the targeted rich people had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis. But as Mr. Zuckerman ponders the Occupy Wall Street movement, he concludes that “the door to it was opened by the Obama administration, going after the ‘millionaires and billionaires’ as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn’t earn it. . . . To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country.”

This doesn’t mean that Mr. Zuckerman opposes the protesters or questions their motives. When pressed, he concedes that the crowd in Lower Manhattan may include some full-time radicals, but he argues that the protesters are people with a legitimate grievance, as the country suffers high unemployment and stagnant middle-class incomes.

It is a subject he has obviously studied at length, and he explains how the real unemployment rate is actually well above the official level of 9.1%, which only measures people who have applied for a job within the previous four weeks. In fact, he says, unemployment has even surged beyond the Department of Labor’s “U-6” number of 16.5% that has received increasing attention lately because it includes people who have given up looking for work within the past year, plus people who have been cut back from full-time employees to part-timers.

Mr. Zuckerman says that when you also consider the labor-force participation rate and the so-called “birth-death series” that measures business starts and failures, the real U.S. unemployment rate is now 20%. His voice rising with equal parts anger and sadness, he exclaims, “That’s not America!”

It certainly isn’t the America that Mr. Zuckerman discovered when he moved south from Canada to study at Wharton and Harvard Law School, graduating from both in the early 1960s. He reports feeling immediately at home and says he never considered returning “because of the sheer openness and energy of life in America.”

The U.S. “has fundamentally great qualities,” he says. “It’s a society that welcomes talent, nourishes talent, admires talent . . . and rewards talent.” But he sees “potentially catastrophic” political and fiscal problems. Mr. Zuckerman reports that when he was a young man, 50% of the top quartile of graduates from Canadian universities moved to the U.S. Now, he says, “I don’t want my daughter telling me, ‘Dad, I want to move back to Canada because that’s the land of opportunity.'”

Mr. Zuckerman’s bearish outlook since 2006 has been good for his business. That’s when he decided that there was a bubble in commercial real estate and his publicly traded real estate investment trust needed to sell some of its office buildings.

 

‘We’ve had a strategy in our business of trying to have ‘A’ assets in ‘A’ locations. I think we had 126 buildings at that point and we came to the conclusion that 16 of them were either A assets in B locations or B assets in A locations, like 280 Park [Avenue in New York]—it was a great address but not a good building. So we sold. We got through 15 of the 16 and we raised in the range of four and a half billion dollars,” he says.

Once the downturn began, that cash pile helped him buy some famous properties at depressed prices, such as the General Motors building in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. But he says his firm is still prepared for possible rough economic times ahead. “We’re keeping it very liquid,” he says, “because I don’t know where this is going.”

Mr. Zuckerman maintains that America will solve its problems over the long haul—”I am not somebody who’s pessimistic about this country. I have had a life that’s been better than my fantasies,” he says—but he’s certainly pessimistic about the current administration. That began shortly after inauguration day in 2009.

At that time he supported Mr. Obama’s call for heavy spending on infrastructure. “But if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program,” says Mr. Zuckerman, “roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic Party.” He adds that “the Republicans understood this” and it diminished the chances for bipartisan legislating.

Then there was health-care reform: “Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at that bill and said, ‘Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!'”

Mr. Zuckerman recalls reports of Mr. Obama consulting various historians on the qualities of a transformational president. “But remember, transformations can go up and they can go down.”

Now comes the latest fight over Mr. Obama’s jobs plan, which has as its centerpiece a tax increase on the wealthy with obvious populist appeal. Mr. Zuckerman supports raising taxes on the rich but says such a proposal cannot be taken seriously unless it’s paired with other measures to grow the economy and restrain deficit spending. He also wonders why, if the president wanted to get a plan enacted, he didn’t begin with private bipartisan discussions with House and Senate leaders, instead of another address to a joint session of Congress.

“Even if you want to do this to revive your support in the base, to revive your credibility on the issues of the economy and jobs, which has fallen off the table, this isn’t going to accomplish it. Another speech from this guy? The country knows this is just another speech. They understand it almost instantaneously, and his numbers have continued to go down for that reason. What the country wanted was some way of coming up with asolution.”

The only solution Mr. Zuckerman sees now to juice the economy “is to broaden the tax base and simplify and lower tax [rates]. To me that will be as close to revenue-neutral as you’re going to have so it isn’t going to be seen as a budget buster.” He views GOP candidate Herman Cain’s “9-9-9 plan” as a “little bit simple-minded,” but he says that a reform that closes loopholes and reduces compliance costs will stimulate both business and consumer spending.

Mr. Zuckerman sees a need for a cooperative effort like that of President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill when they reformed Social Security in 1983. That wasn’t a permanent solution, of course, as Social Security needs more significant changes now, but Mr. Zuckerman sees it as a model of bipartisan progress.

Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.

Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. “I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan,” says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff’s release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.

“Reagan surprised me,” says Mr. Zuckerman. “He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts.”

 

‘I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him,” continues Mr. Zuckerman. “And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don’t want to do and to like it. And that’s what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That’s what this president has lost.”

“Democracy does not work without the right leadership,” he says later, “and you can’t play politics.” The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. “The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you’re doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country.”

SOURCE 

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Something to complain about

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The party is getting started; get out your marshmallows and hot dog sticks.

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A 100 “combat equipped” forces have been dispatched to Uganda to help the rid the countrie’s Lord’s Resistance Army which has been active for 20 years. This action is short of military intervention; and is in force to defend against said crimes against humanity.

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Herman Cain’s rise in the polls this week doesn’t change the fact that Mitt Romney is still the most likely Republican nominee for president, but it does underscore the biggest remaining question mark about him: If he wins the primary, will that kill the Tea Party?

In other words, will the conservative grassroots turn out in force for a Romney ticket — not only to vote, but also to organize and recruit supporters — like they did in the 2010 midterm elections? Romney’s critics argue they won’t.

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe raised the prospect of a third party candidate if the former Massachusetts governor is the nominee, telling The New York Times this week that at the very least, a Romney candidacy would discourage conservative activism in the 2012 election.

Advisers to Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), whose $15 million war chest will keep him around as a challenger to Romney despite his recent stumbles, are beginning to latch on to this argument.

“The fundamental problem Mitt Romney will have will be to sell his East Coast, government-knows-all views to the base. He’s the modern day equivalent of Nelson Rockefeller trying to sell himself to Ronald Reagan’s party,” said Bob Haus, a co-chair of Perry’s Iowa campaign. “Carbon taxes, government-run health care and repeated flip flops are going to make that sale hard.”

John Stemberger, a former Florida GOP official and Rick Perry supporter, wrote Thursday in Newsmax, “Mitt Romney is another John McCain waiting to happen. There is no way the base is going to be excited about and pour themselves into a Romney campaign.”

Interviews with several Tea Party activists and conservative officials in early primary and swing states showed some agreement with that sentiment. But there were a surprising number who said they would work for the Republican nominee no matter who it is, even if it is Romney.

“Most people do not like Romney,” said Dave Zupan, a Tea Party leader from the Cleveland suburbs. But, Zupan told The Huffington Post, “our goal is to beat Obama and flip the Senate. So if [Romney]’s the candidate, we’re going to beat Obama with him and we’re going to flip the Senate.”

“The Tea Party’s going to show up for whoever’s the candidate. We’re focused on a goal,” said Zupan, who is active in two local Ohio groups and is also on a 12-member Tea Party Debt Commission organized in part by FreedomWorks, a D.C.-based national organization that works with grassroots groups around the country.

Zupan said that giving control of the Senate over to Republicans would be a way to hem Romney in, helping ensure he fulfills promises to conservatives such as repealing Obama’s health law.

The Romney campaign believes that unlike the 2008 election, when Democratic voters were spurred by passion for their candidate, Republicans will be motivated in 2012 not by personality but by their view of current circumstances. Many Tea Party activists believe that the country is at a crisis point and that a second term for Obama would make it impossible in the future to reduce the size of government.

“We have one last opportunity to turn this country around,” said Ana Puig, mother of four and a Tea Party activist from the Philadelphia suburbs.

Romney’s brain trust is betting that conservatives like Puig will make up for what their candidate lacks in personal dynamism and conservative orthodoxy.

“If Mitt Romney becomes the nominee, the entire party will rally behind him as the strongest leader on the paramount issue of our time — putting America back to work,” top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told HuffPost. “He will then go on to defeat President Obama and begin the task of turning around a very troubled economy.”

Despite the conservative angst about Romney’s authenticity, he has performed well as a candidate. In addition, a long list of potential rivals have decided not to run, and the other candidates who are in the race have failed to mount a serious challenge to Romney. So he remains in a strong position. Republican pollster Ed Goeas said he could see Romney’s poll numbers, which have not broken above 25 percent for most of the campaign, getting into the high 30s or even low 40s in the next month.

Even Kibbe, during an interview with HuffPost last month, gave off evidence that he was resigning himself to a Romney candidacy. But a Republican party whose most active participants have simply settled for their nominee will not be enough to defeat Obama, who holds the formidable advantages that come with incumbency.

“If Romney is the nominee I think you end up with the pure question on the ballot on election day, which is, ‘Are you firing Barack Obama?'” South Carolina state Rep. Kris Crawford (R), who organized a movement to encourage New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to run earlier this year, told HuffPost.

Crawford, who has not endorsed any of the presidential candidates, said Romney would “take some of the heat out of the game” for conservative activists in the Palmetto State. But he added that South Carolina will go for the Republican nominee no matter who it is, so the Romney impact would be negligible there.

Bob MacGuffie, a Tea Party activist from Fairfield, C.T., said that even though he would support Romney if he won the primary, such a scenario would produce “a lot of idle engines” in the general election.

“There’s no short answer to it. Obviously we don’t move as a monolith,” MacGuffie told HuffPost. “There will be a good chunk who will sit on their hands, others will turn to anti-Obama activism and there’s a good chunk who will say, ‘He’s our nominee and we’ve got to help him win.'”

Jerry DeLemus, who leads a Tea Party group in Rochester, N.H., was the only activist who spoke to HuffPost who said categorically that he will not campaign for Romney, though he said he didn’t rule out voting for him.

“Everybody in the Tea Party movement wants to see Obama not win a second term, for a variety of reasons. And there are those in there who may go ahead and support Romney. I’m not one of those guys who will say that,” DeLemus said.

But several other Tea Party activists and conservatives, like Zupan, were just as adamant that they will work for Romney if he beats the other Republican candidates.

“If he’s the last man standing, would you see people charge up the hill — maybe myself included — to try to beat Barack Obama? Probably,” said the leader of one of the most influential national Tea Party groups who asked not to be identified. “I admitted to my wife, there are far worse things than Mitt Romney being our nominee.”

Puig said skeptics are “going to be surprised.”

“I think we will be energized no matter who it is,” she said. “The Tea Party movement started because of the election of Barack Obama. So now is the time to take him out.”

SOURCE

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We’re in this for the long haul. There are no “solutions” that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new “normal” then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.

– Email in “Occupy” archive, “Re: Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party Movement?”; Wednesday, October 12, 2011

In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails.

The email archive, created by a private cyber security researcher, appears to contain messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the “Occupy Wall Street” and broader “Occupy” campaign this fall.

Big Government received a tip about the existence of the archive, and we were able to contact the individual who compiled and posted it. He will describe the archive, and how he obtained the emails, later this morning exclusively on Big Government.

Through “crowdsourcing,” the media and the public will then be able to discover the truth behind the “Occupy” movement.

The archive includes emails, for example, from radical anarchist organizer Lisa Fithian, who was profiled earlier this week at Big Government, and who is one of the leading organizers behind the Occupy movement.

In one email, dated October 1, Fithian applauds the launch of “occupations” throughout the country. She also highlights an ACORN-style illegal home occupation in California, linking to a television news story that reveals the involvement of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which is apparently the reconstituted version of ACORN in California.

Read the rest (and crowdsource  the emails) here.

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